


Rhapsody in Brashness

by willowbilly



Category: Hannibal (TV), Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Bickering, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Established Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter, Everyone is sassy, F/F, Humor, Light Angst, M/M, Parallels, Pining, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Post-Season/Series 01, Villanelle Meets the Murder Husbands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 04:00:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14866199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: “We understand,” says Hannibal. The vibrations of his voice rumble against her the way that thunder does through storm clouds. “You are unique, as I am. And she insinuated herself into you, as Will insinuated himself into me. The blind, pearly rootlets of human connection have burrowed themselves too deeply into the fertile soil of your soul to be killed, now, no matter how many times you hack away at the verdant growth which springs anew into the air, again and again. The intricate underground web of them merely spreads implacably further and deeper and will continue to do so until they smother you, or until you allow the leaves to fully unfurl into the light.”“But shestabbedme,” Villanelle exclaims petulantly.





	Rhapsody in Brashness

The mark was another illicitly rich Italian guy named Lorenzo Bianchi and someone else had killed him before Villanelle had gotten there.

The body was still tied to the ornately carved and upholstered mahogany chair it had died in and there was someone standing over it. Usually this is when Villanelle would scream and act shocked long enough to either kill the witness or make her escape, but judging by the knife and the blood spatters, the someone in question was the bastard who'd stolen her job out from under her, and therefore Villanelle was rather curious and rather murderous about him and who the fuck he could possibly be.

She stays silent and watches for awhile, lingering in the dining room doorway. The desultory cacophony of a big band jazz orchestra spills from the speakers of a portable radio near the man's feet. He has his back to her, working on the corpse, and his mop of clean, curly brown hair catches the breeze flowing in from the open veranda and twists up in drifty, unruly chunks as he labors, the littler strands at the nape of his neck plastering themselves to the sheen of light sweat starting on his skin.

Pretty hair. Kind of full and wavy.

He's dissecting. Butchering, really. Taking out the sweetbreads with smooth gloved hands and dropping them in a clean plastic Tupperware container on the fancy, shiny table beside him, the light gray nitrile slicked pink. He's also already severed Lorenzo's penis and stuffed it down the dead man's throat. A nice touch which Villanelle can't help but approve of.

She wonders if she's going to cut this man's penis off and do the same to him as he's done to Lorenzo. As she's done to Anna's husband. It'd be a good bit of dramatic irony. Narrative parallels, and all.

“Are you going to just stand there all day, or what?” the man asks without turning around. English. American accent. Flat tone, void of surprise.

“Oh God,” Villanelle says, feigning horrified paralysis as she replies in kind in the crude and boring inflections of American English. Tears fill her eyes and her voice goes choked and panicked as she turns on the babbling auto-begging. “Please don't kill me, please, oh God. Murderer! _Murderer!_ Someone, somebody _help!”_

“Will you quit that?” he snaps, only now looking at her. His mouth is thinned with unimpressed annoyance and there's blood splashed all over the front of his button-down and Villanelle recognizes him.

She laughs, her performance forgotten in the midst of immediate delight, and absently she flicks the tears from her face before they can irritate her complexion too much more. The salt still stings, tight and sweet, and she licks the trace of it from the pad of her index finger with a playful tap before waggling the same finger in the man's direction. Back and forth, _aha_ and _naughty naughty_ both at once. “I know who you are,” she tells him, keeping the English but dropping the accent.

He raises an eyebrow. Carelessly folds his arms and smears blood onto the rolled-up sleeves bunched above his elbows. The knife blade winks silver through the red, sticking up away from his arm at the same angle as his ruffled hair.

“You,” Villanelle coos, “are William Graham.”

“Just Will,” he says.

“You killed my guy,” she says, gesturing.

“Sorry,” says Will, utterly unapologetic.

“Oh my goodness,” says Villanelle, adopting a girlish squeal and jumping up and down on the balls of her feet. This is more genuine than the horrified routine. Her stomach is really fluttering and everything. She's _excited._ This is _exciting._ “You are a serial killer, yes? I am _such_ a fan.”

“Okay,” says Will. He unfolds his arms and turns away to put the Tupperware lid onto the container and snap it shut. Presses down on the corners with the heels of his hands to be sure it's secure.

“Hey,” says Villanelle sharply. “Hey, look at me. Don't look away from me, look at me.”

He does so. His eyes pinch warily, but there's no begrudging reluctance, and no fear, either. Just watchfulness. His expression is very still and controlled but he seems weary beneath that anyways. Tired in both the “exhausted” _and_ in the “pissed off” sense.

“Where is the other one? Your husband?” she asks.

He blinks at her, slow, and does not take his eyes from hers. One of his hands is still set on the Tupperware. Carefully relaxed. The other holds the knife. Down at his side, also careful, also too relaxed. There is the faintest outline of a reflection in the stainless steel, cloudy beneath the rusty veil of blood sheeting the metal. A silhouette.

Villanelle grins. Cups a hand to her mouth as if to keep her words for Will and Will alone. “He's behind me right now, isn't he?” she says to him, in a giddy shriek of a whisper which dissolves straight into an undignified giggle of glee and she's _moving,_ dodging the new knife cutting through the air where her back had been.

Would've stuck her in the spine if she'd stayed. Wow.

The next few seconds are a blur of struggle, a commotion of bodies slamming in close and furious, muscle against muscle and hard edges rammed into soft places. Villanelle's hand is almost cramping with how tightly she's clenching onto the wrist of the man's knife hand, both of their arms stretched out and waving wildly as they each conspire to stab the other while simultaneously strenuously keeping themselves from being stabbed.

He's heavier and stronger than she is, with a longer reach and, quite frankly, the advantage, but she's younger and more flexible and _offended_ and eventually she wrangles herself onto his back and gets her hairpin out and she shoves the point into his ear. Not far enough to even puncture his eardrum or anything, but getting there. Getting threatening.

“Ha _ha,”_ she says.

For a moment they freeze but for their harsh panting. He's on his hands and knees on the fine hardwood floor and she's draped over him in what could be mistaken for a very compromising position. His body heat soaks up through the fine silk blend of his crisply starched shirt, the fabric a little damp and losing some of its crispness what with perspiration from their shared exertion, and she notes this with a distant sense of distaste as his breathing pushes the baking planes of his back up against her front like a bellows, like the insistence of power, barely contained.

She remembers that English nursery rhyme. Or was it just a phrase? A song? _Catch a tiger by the tail._

If he's a tiger then Villanelle is a black panther. A leopard or jaguar or something. Black panthers are far cooler. Suave and mysterious. And they have rosettes instead of stripes, which Villanelle prefers. Fashion should always be a consideration in these sorts of hypothetical decisions.

“Kill him and die,” Will warns her, and Villanelle looks up past Hannibal Lecter's silver-shot head of coarse and unremarkable hair to see the other half of the infamous Murder Husbands propped against the table with the knife set aside in favor of a handgun trained lackadaisically on her.

Villanelle rears back onto her knees and yanks Hannibal up with her, his larger body shielding her, her hairpin still lodged light and tickling in his ear, their hands still both holding Hannibal's knife out to the side, straight as an outstretched wing, or a surrender, or a mockery. Hannibal allows himself to be manhandled, moving with the easy, compliant grace of a ballroom dancer. Content to lull her into false confidence.

She peeks up over the broad slope of Hannibal's shoulder, eyebrows lifted high, her head cocking to indicate Hannibal's submissively downcast face. “You care for him?”

“By some miracle, yeah, I do,” Will says.

Villanelle hooks her chin over Hannibal's shoulder and smiles. “Would you like him even without a penis?” she asks.

Will's eyes flicker towards Lorenzo and back. There is something understanding and mildly exasperated in them. Some minor, creeping epiphany.

He's expansive, Villanelle thinks. When people die they drop in so small, they shrink so far, that they can no longer control anything, that they are rendered mute and helpless, collapsed and compacted into solid insignificance like a black hole. A pinprick singularity of nothingness.

This Will Graham is so very much the opposite that he seems almost as directionless. Adrift. The innate cohesion of his self so loosely composed, so nebulous and permeable in construction, that he's spilling out of himself, that he's melding with the edges of everyone around him.

He has the existential fear of a dying thing; the sort of fear which precludes that of anything left in life. And he has the same desperation for control and the same bitter resignation as the dying. But constant. Omnipresent. Survivor's resentment.

Perhaps this is one person who would actually leave his body when she kills him. Perhaps she would see his soul float from his eyes along with the final dilation of his pupils, released from earthly torment and into that of the unearthly, into the ethereal realm where so much of him seemingly already resides.

She wants to find out.

“Would you like me more?” Will asks her.

Villanelle laughs. Hannibal twitches as her laughter shakes the hairpin, his other ear brushing against hers with the velvety whisper of downy skin against skin as he recoils. She nudges her temple against his in retaliation, knocks into him until he tilts away and gives her back her space. “Who says I like you?” she says to Will.

“You said so yourself. Said you're 'such a fan.'” Will's eyelids droop to half-mast and he watches her from beneath his lashes. Detached, but not indifferent. More as if caught up in the daydream of it all. Entertaining the numb pleasantries of the nightmare. “Besides, he'd be dead by now if you didn't want to talk to me.”

“Oh, perhaps,” she concedes blithely.

Hannibal hums a gravelly little sound of disagreement in the back of his throat because he really does think of himself as such hot shit.

Villanelle blows air into his ear until he leans further from her and towards the hairpin with a quiet, long-suffering sigh. She can barely glimpse the milky flash of the whites of his eyes in her peripheral vision as he rolls them. The sclera are stained with the bittersweet rivers of broken blood vessels, wending their wormy way upwards to wreathe around his muddy irises like miniature unholy halos.

He is even uglier in person than he is in his mugshot. Downright ugly-duckling odd, but magnetically so; all idiosyncratically warped swan, all elegant beast. Villanelle, with all her own obvious, unsubtle, fine-boned beauty, pities him. Heart-to-heart, monster-to-monster. Superior to inferior.

“Who is it that I reminded you of? What is it about me, with him, which makes you hope?” Will asks, and when she goes still, this time, it is not because she has won, and it is not an act.

“You see too much for me to say 'nothing,' and for you to believe me,” Villanelle says. “Don't you? Mr. Sad Freak over there. Makes me boo-hoo just to look at you.”

“Who are they?” he presses.

“She is nothing like you,” says Villanelle.

“We understand,” says Hannibal. The vibrations of his voice rumble against her the way that thunder does through storm clouds. “You are unique, as I am. And she insinuated herself into you, as Will insinuated himself into me. The blind, pearly rootlets of human connection have burrowed themselves too deeply into the fertile soil of your soul to be killed, now, no matter how many times you hack away at the verdant growth which springs anew into the air, again and again. The intricate underground web of them merely spreads implacably further and deeper and will continue to do so until they smother you, or until you allow the leaves to fully unfurl into the light.”

“But she _stabbed_ me,” Villanelle exclaims petulantly. “In my _stomach,_ as she held me in her arms.”

“So?” Will scoffs, and pulls the hem of his shirt from where it's tucked into his trousers, lifting it until a scar smiles out from the skin beneath, raised and white and merry.

“She betrayed me,” says Villanelle.

Will shrugs. “Comes with the territory.”

“I killed a work friend of hers and she is maybe still a little teensy bit mad at me for it,” she says, scrunching her nose.

“Fuck, I'm still angry at _him_ about Beverly,” says Will, sparing a second to narrow his eyes at Hannibal with a jerk of his chin. “That also comes with the territory of _stabbing people.”_

This time Hannibal is the one who shrugs. Then he shifts, sliding his legs wider with a faint grimace of discomfort. Villanelle's knees are also starting to ache on the hardwood so she can only assume that his old man bones are suffering more, but she still finds it amusing that he thinks wriggling his arse will distract her from the flex of his wrist within her hand as he flips the knife to point downwards in his fist. Cute bastard. Trying to use his crafty masculine wiles on her.

She'll have to kill him sooner than she'd planned. Seeing as he has the gall to also be planning something.

“So you have never tried to take your vengeance for this Beverly?” Villanelle asks Will.

“Of course I have. How do you think I got this?” Will says, his fingers twitching at the hem of his shirt again and then smoothing the rumpled ruck of it back down beneath his belt. The gun in his other hand is unwavering, and black but for the silencer screwed onto the end, itself brushed an unmatching matte gray. Patchwork the way that Will is, with his belly scar, and with the other scars she can see at the line of his stubbly beard, and on the side of his forehead. And with the way that she thinks he is getting into her head, the way he is infiltrating her.

It seems that his mind is not so much nebulous as it is gaseous. Poison in the trenches. Chemical warfare. _Psychological_ warfare, in and of himself.

He really is nothing like Eve. Nothing at all, and Villanelle hates and loves him for it, hates and loves this stranger who hates and loves a psychopath so like and unlike herself. Or does he even hate Hannibal at all?

Is that even possible?

“I will take vengeance for you, if you are so bad at it,” says Villanelle generously, and she pushes the hairpin deeper into Hannibal's ear just to see Will's mouth go hard and serious, and to feel how Hannibal very intentionally does not react at all.

 _There_ it is. _There's_ Will Graham's anchor.

“Ooh,” she says, as if surprised at Will's displeasure, and withdraws the pin to its original position. “Whoopsie.”

For all that Will holds the gun casually his knuckles are still white. It's almost a tossup as to whether or not Villanelle can kill Hannibal and then rush Will in time. It's an Old West standoff. Spaghetti Western, really, what with the balmy Italian breeze billowing the veranda curtains and rustling in the lush vineyard just beyond, and the flavor of fresh basil pesto and salt lingering on Villanelle's tongue.

The radio speakers continue blasting their music, but it has faded into a blues piece, now, a meandering marriage of piano and saxophone which is more moaning and far quieter than the orchestra, and so it is easier for them to hear the distant thud and crash of the front door being kicked open, and the beat of footsteps approaching at a frantic sprint through the spacious hallways.

For them all to hear Eve Polastri yell Villanelle's names. Villanelle, Oksana, Asshole, I Know You're Here Somewhere.

Villanelle's heart skips, hopping up hot into the back of her throat for an instant, and she blames her eagerness and schoolgirl-with-a-crush nerves and her ever-present curiosity and the wretched spurned-love grudge which she still holds against Eve for _stabbing_ her, blames all of this for the fact that she calls out to Eve, careless and callous and saccharine, _“Here!_ I am in here, my darling!” without a second thought.

She has never been a particularly patient woman. Nor a wise one. Because why bother, really.

Eve skids around the corner and into the sunlit dining room with her gun drawn.

“Not at _me,_ silly, _he_ is the one with the gun,” says Villanelle, craning her neck to see Eve and giving an adamant sideways nod towards Will.

Eve has already retrained her weapon. Her authoritative announcement is rather undercut by her sputtering. “Freeze! Don't you kill her— him— Villanelle, don't— no one kill anyone!” She catches sight of Lorenzo and her face drains of blood. Much like Lorenzo. “Oh, Jesus, you shoved it down his _throat?”_

“Was not me, this time,” Villanelle says.

Will raises his hand. “To be fair,” he says, “the guy was involved in human trafficking.”

“Please stop pointing your gun at her,” says Eve. Open concern is plastered across her blanched expression. Concern for Villanelle, which is as ludicrous as ever. But _god_ she looks sexy when she goes all flustered, righteous law-enforcement like that, and of course her hair is down and it's _amazing._

Will lowers his hand and raises both eyebrows instead. Then slowly reorients his gun towards Eve.

“Better,” Eve says.

“Uh, no, _not_ better,” Villanelle objects. “I am the one with the dibs on threatening Eve, _William.”_

“You're— wait, you're Will Graham,” Eve realizes. “You two— you two are _Will Graham_ and _Hannibal Lecter._ You're on so many Most Wanted Lists it's not even funny. You two serial killers— _serial killed_ that _guy.”_

“Again, he was not a good man,” says Will.

 _“Neither are either of you,”_ Eve shouts.

“Oh, 'cause _you're_ such a saint.”

Villanelle, raptly following the exchange as she would an especially enchanting tennis match, takes in a breath to cut in with the perfect snarky comment of her own only for the room to suddenly upend itself around her. She slams against the floor so hard she's dazed, and it takes her too long to realize that Hannibal has flipped her. He's crouching over her head, the glinting point of her hairpin hovering over her right eye. So close that her lashes brush against it when she blinks.

“Ow,” she whines, once she's gotten her breath back. “Pretty athletic for an ancient old man. Bravo.”

“Grazie,” he says, ignoring her jibe with great aplomb and even greater smugness.

“Oh no. Oh _fuck,”_ says Eve. “Don't do it. Don't you hurt her.”

“I thought you stabbed her?” Hannibal says.

Eve's pallor is rapidly usurped by a blush of embarrassment. “That's different,” she says, clearly unable to come up with any better a rebuttal.

“Drop it and slide it over,” Will tells Eve. “Or I imagine things are just going to devolve into a mess which none of us want.” He visibly reconsiders, brows pinching, and corrects himself. “Which only two of us want.”

Eve grits her teeth but does as he says, setting the gun down and kicking it over. Will catches it beneath his shoe, and then looks to Hannibal.

Hannibal and Villanelle refocus on each other, because without the others interacting between themselves they are the most interesting things in the room.

“You look even uglier upside down,” says Villanelle.

Hannibal smiles down at her with all the benevolence of a saint painted on a ceiling's chapel. He leans close enough to whisper, and does so gently enough that the others will not hear over the music. Gentle like when the knife goes in slow. “It is a miserable, hollow existence, to be as alone as you are without her,” he says.

“As you were without him?” she whispers back, sneering, but her voice cracks with how close it scrapes to honesty, to raw, wistful want, and she thinks that her jealousy is so sharp in her eyes that it is going to flood out, overflow like tears of acid.

“I was,” he says simply, jubilantly, fondly. The past tense its own victory banner.

“You have a lisp,” she informs him pettily. “And frankly? Ease up on the garlic. _Whew.”_

The hairpin gouges a burning slash of pain down her cheekbone as she jerks to the side, barely avoiding the death blow; her whole body curves like an eel's as it panics in the fisherman's fist. The pin thunks into the immaculately waxed and polished wood beside her head with an inordinately light little sound and tears a loop of hair from her bun as she wrenches herself away.

 _“Hannibal,”_ Will says, and the knife halts against Villanelle's throat, the cool edge of it instantly and utterly motionless, and Villanelle begins to laugh and laugh, shuddering with humor there on the floor because if Hannibal Lecter is thunder then she is the lightning, crackling and electric and fizzling out into serpentine afterimages, and she is brighter than he is, rarer and dazzling and devastating, and he is just a harmless echo in comparison.

Out of the corner of her eye she can see Eve covering her mouth, her short-lived scream of horror stifled, and she laughs at her, too.

“Are you sure?” asks Hannibal. “She is very rude, Will. And an assassin.”

Will is studying Eve. Or not really. More beholding her, taking her in as if she is someone he knew once, someone whom he can't decide whether to miss or to dread, and as if he has all the time in the world to mull over the matter at his leisure.

He looks at her as if she can't see him. As if the separation of his own experiences renders him invisible to everybody besides himself and Hannibal. Because of course Hannibal Lecter is the only one who can see Will Graham in turn. Of course he is the only exception. Of course.

“Call it sympathy,” Will says. “Or pity, I don't know. It's not important why.” He picks up Eve's gun. Sets it atop the Tupperware of sweetbreads and tucks them both beneath his arm.

Villanelle takes the opportunity to shimmy sneakily out from under Hannibal's blade and sit herself up, but she pauses when Will does, and meets his mournful eyes when they seek her out.

“She needs you, too,” he says.

“I don't need anyone,” Villanelle dismisses. “I want them. And what I want, I get.”

“Nice try there, asshole,” says Eve.

“I am going to, Eve,” says Villanelle. The certainty is in her like a compass needle, spinning to Eve's true north. She's not sure what she means in 'getting,' if she means killing or loving or something else entirely, but she knows that she will have it. That she'll have Eve, one way or another. “We are inevitable.”

“Not if I get you first,” Eve says. With the sun shining through the veranda her dark eyes are rendered as soft and delicious a brown as those expensive chocolate truffles always nestled in ruffled gold foil, and the beautiful, hazy cloud of her hair springs out as if in leonine indignation around her long, oval face, framing the high planes of her cheekbones. She is squinting in determination, at Villanelle and against the light, in a way which picks the lines of age out sharp and delicate in the soft weathered ivory of her skin. Drawing attention to how her wrinkles only solidify and dignify and exalt the flesh which they grace.

“God, you are so beautiful,” Villanelle tells her, and somehow this makes the shade of her eyes soften further, makes them gleam silken and endless even as she sets her jaw and scowls.

“Jesus fucking Christ, it's like looking in a funhouse mirror,” Will sighs, disbelievingly. “Just. Fuck. Good luck, but goodbye, because I'm not dealing with this. Come on, Hannibal.”

Hannibal rises from his crouch, prompting Villanelle to likewise scramble with childish haste to her feet lest she permit him any sort of advantage again. He smirks at her and dips his head in what is probably a facetious bow before he passes over to Will's side. He relieves Will of the Tupperware and the spare gun, their maneuver familiar and smooth and dripping in subtle yet free-flowing affection, hands and bodies brushing, touches skimming against the respective bones of their metaphorically joined hips, and he leans in to bestow a brief, humble kiss to the corner of Will's mouth before he leaves through the veranda doors.

A exhibitionist's final cruelty, Villanelle muses, rubbing her thumb over the cut on her cheek and breaking through the gummy scab which had already formed there.

The fucker had taken her new hairpin, too. And after she'd gone to such lengths to indulge her intention to do the second Italian in with the same hallmark weapon as the first.

“Don't kill each other, if you can,” Will tells her and Eve, in a rather listless, hopeless, plaintive sort of command, and then he follows Hannibal out. The gauzy curtains swirl behind them as they vault the veranda railing and disappear into the dusty green rows upon rows of grapevines which roll tall and thick and eternal over the sun-drenched land beyond.

Beside the sultry, accelerating urban meditation of Gershwin crackling from the sub-quality speakers as the orchestra's brass section swells, Lorenzo's mutilated corpse emits a faint, gurgling fart.

“Ew,” says Villanelle.

“You forgot your fucking radio,” Eve shouts after them, and is met with silence. She snorts, and turns to commiserate with Villanelle. “Can you belie—”

Just in time to deflect the spare knife Villanelle pulled from her boot as it hurtles for Eve's side.

 _“Oh fuck you,”_ Eve snarls, and punches Villanelle in the face.

“If you want,” Villanelle says with a saucy, exaggerated wink, grinning through bloody, swollen lips, the scarlet of it slick on her teeth and tasting of joy, and then they're off.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Rebloggable post [here!](http://willowbilly.tumblr.com/post/174646538131/rhapsody-in-brashness-willowbilly-killing-eve)


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